Life Outside PLT1

Cooking: Deconstruting a McChicken Burger

November 3, 2009 on 7:36 pm | In Food | | Balinor

As some of you might be aware, I like cooking. I even have a gallery of dishes I’ve cooked (and deemed worthy to be photographed and put on the Internet) here. Last week when I was watching Top Chef they had an elimination challenge of deconstructing a well known dish. From what they explained on the show was, you take a dish that everyone knows (like fish and chips or sweet and sour pork), break the dish down and remake the dish so that it is different but when the diner eats it can figure out that this is that well known dish. I thought that was quite an interesting idea and today I tried my hands on deconstructing something simple, a McChicken Burger.

Breaking down a McChicken Burger is actually quite simple, all the components that I know of are chicken, salad and bread. Looking at each of those more closely, the chicken is coated and seasoned, the salad is just lettuce with mayo and the bread just has sesame seeds on it. With those three components listed like that I thought why not do a normal protein on vegetable with a carbohydrate on the side dish that you normally find at most western restaurants.

After some searching on the Internet, I have found the ingredients that goes into making a McChicken burger and attempt to copy it my dish. First off we have the chicken, which according to the online recipe, the coating consisted of, bread crumbs, flour, salt, onion powder, pepper, garlic powder and some other thing that I don’t know. What I did in my version was not to completely coat it like you’ll find in the burger but just lightly coat it to be baked. My ingredients for it was, flour, salt, pepper, onion soup powder (the stuff you can buy at the supermarkets) and rosemary. I put the chicken (breast) into my little toaster oven and set it to bake.

The salad was easy. In the burger, the salad is just lettuce with mayo so I used regular lettuce but I dressed it with mayo, virgin olive oil and toasted sesame seeds. The seeds of course comes from the bun on the burger. The only component left was the bread so I just tasted two cut of rolls that was buttered.

After everything was put together and eat commenced I have say my oven skills need work as the chicken was quite dry but it was close to how the chicken tasted the burger. The salad I thought was quite good except for maybe using extra virgin olive oil wasn’t the best or maybe I should use less next time. The sesame seeds with the salad though gives really good flavour to it. All in all not a bad attempt I thought but thinking on it now I might have tried this dish before. At least now though I have it on record.

***

Now usually I have to cook something for mum to eat as she’s vegetarian. You can see in my galley I often have a non-vegetarian dish and a vegetarian dish. Tonight, because I was busy putting together my dinner, I quickly slapped together something for mum. As it turned out it was better tasting than my non vegetarian dish.

That picture to me reminds me of Malaysian dishes that you can get in, well Malaysia. Dry vegetarian lamb red curry was the dish and here I served it with the salad I made and rice. The vegetarian lamb is made from shitake mushroom stalks and flavoured. Often when eating at vegetarian restaurants and they have curry, that’s the “meat” that they use.

Making it was quite simple, cloves with diced really fine onion, ginger and lemon grass, saluted in oil until brown. Add in a diced tomato and cook until tomato starts to break. Throw in the “meat” and coat with ingredients in the pan and cook for a few minutes. Since the “meat” is already cooked all you need to do is just warm it up a little. Add in solution that I made of curry powder, chillie powder, cumin powder, pepper and water and stir through. Cook until the solution starts to reduce and then seasoned with salt.

The dry curry was actually quite a good accompaniment to the salad. I wasn’t sure if it would go well but it did. I quite like dishes that I make that come out good by accident